Rhys

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys ISBN-13: 978-0393352566 176 pages

Friday, December 8, 2017, Time: 1:00-3:00

Location: Northbrook Public Library, Civic Room

Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys’s return
to the literary center stage. She had a startling early career and was known
for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With Wide
Sargasso Sea, her last and best-selling novel, she ingeniously brings into
light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic
from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This mesmerizing work introduces us
to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into
marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society
so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally
drive a woman out of her mind.

The novel describes the background to the marriage
that Jane learns about after going to work for Mr. Rochester. It is the story of
Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress, from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to
her unhappy marriage to a certain English gentleman—he is never named by the
author. He renames her to a prosaic Bertha, declares her mad, and requires her
to relocate to England. Caught in an oppressive patriarchal society in which
she fully belongs neither to the Europeans nor the Jamaicans, Antoinette Cosway
is Rhys' version of Brontë's devilish "madwoman in the attic." As
with many postcolonial works, the novel deals with the themes of ethnic
inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation. It is also
concerned with power relations between men and women.